A virtual machine is an efficient, isolated and virtualized representation of a physical machine. Software executing inside a virtual machine is restricted to the resources and abstractions implemented by the virtual machine. In other words, the software is isolated to and cannot break out of the virtual world defined by the virtual machine. Numerous virtual machines may share underlying physical machine resources, each virtual machine executing its own operating system and/or process(es). In some instances, a software layer called a virtual machine monitor or hypervisor is implemented between the virtual machine(s) and the physical hardware. A hypervisor can run on bare hardware (e.g., as a native virtual machine) or on top of an operating system (e.g., as a hosted virtual machine).
A virtual machine template is an image or file that defines and/or specifies hardware and/or software settings that may be used repeatedly to start, create and/or instantiate a virtual machine pre-configured with those settings. A virtual machine template, as a representation or derivative of a source computing environment, generally includes virtual hardware components, an installed guest operating system (if applicable) and one or more software applications. Virtual machine templates enable information technology organizations to rapidly and/or easily create and deploy new virtual machines and/or virtual servers.